#1 - Answer to Job Dear Job, You have suffered more than any other man on earth deserves to suffer. However you say that you are blameless, and while that is true, it is also a God-given characteristic. He gave you this positive extreme, but with a positive must come a negative. The negative extreme He has allowed to occur is the losses you have suffered, which are worse than anyone should have to endure. While you are blameless, God is perfect. No human can be perfect. God is perfect because He is the Supreme Being, and He governs what is to be described as perfect. In the case of God, perfect does not mean perpetual, uninterrupted do-gooding; it means He is a perfectly balanced being who has created a balanced world. The world is not fair because it has been "given into the hand of the wicked" (Job 9:24). However, the material power they gain pales in comparison to the strength you gain from your personal relationship with God. The wicked are not the ones who have harmed you. God has only put you to a test; if you are truly blameless, then you will always be under the watchful eye of God. While He will always be "on your side," as long as you remain blameless, you will not always come out of the battle completely unscathed. Knowing that He is there with you should give you the strength to fight on. If you sin, then you have tarnished your blameless relationship with God. He is testing you to see how strong your faith, devotion, and intimacy with Him is. What does not kill you only makes you stronger. Your relationship is as strong as it can possibly be if you are able to lose everything and still have faith in God. In your suffering, see the light through the darkness, and that light is your never-failing faith in God. Cherish that light, reach out for it, hold it tight, never let it go, and that light will be the source of your true strength and integrity. That light, that strong faith, is the one thing above all else that you have control over. Nobody can rob you of that identity, unless you allow it to be taken. In your anger you err somewhat from you sinless ways. You play the role of a victim too much in your pleadings with God. You say "If I sin, what do I owe to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you?" (Job 7:20) and you ask why you should not be impatient. You should not be impatient with Him because He is unimaginably more powerful, and He has a master plan that a human, however blameless you are, cannot hope to comprehend because we are mortals and He is an immortal superhuman being, existing on a separate plane of existence. Do not be so self-righteous and self-absorbed that you lose your perspective on God, for if that moment comes, then you have truly lost everything. Remember that no matter the size of you loss, you are still one man in a sea of many, while He is the only Supreme Being. If you discard all the information I have supplied you with so far, remember this. If you are truly blameless and remain so, then always have faith that God is with you always, and has never abandoned you, Keep your faith strong, and draw strength from it in the darkest of times. #2 - Response to My Response to Job Dear Job, God has singled you out and punished you because you are better than He is. Your morality is at a greater level than His is, and this angers Him. You must accept the good and bad aspects of God. If He is perfect, does that not also mean that He is perfectly unjust as well as perfectly just? Everything you have done for yourself is right in the ways of God. Because of this, nobody may criticize you but Him. Your suffering originates from Him. He is just. You are innocent. These statements contradict each other because language cannot describe those aspects because understanding them comes from God's plane of existence. Man has been created in God's image. Therefore suffering must also come from man. You are a mirror of God, and you bring suffering upon yourself. You are not perfect because you spend so much time with God. You, unlike God, are not perfectly balanced, because your family has sinners, and all you have done is offer sacrifices to forgive them. You have not tried to change their ways because you are so self-absorbed and self-centered with your relationship with God that you have disregarded His relationship with your family. However, all in all, you have done the right thing by questioning Him. If you never question that whom you worship, your relationship with that being will always be a one-way street. #3 - Who is to blame in Genesis? I believe God is to blame in the circle because before the events with the serpent, Adam, and Eve, occur, God has made the Earth and animals and Adam and Eve. If God made them then is He not also responsible for them? In the same way Jesus relates to vicarious liability in the New Testament, does that concept not also apply to God's liability for Adam, Eve, and the serpent? God made Adam and Eve in His image. If God had not known the difference between good and evil would the serpent He made have been able to trick Him, the supposed Almighty Creator? While that question is academic because it did not occur, is it a valid question to ask if there was ever a point where God did not know or understand the difference between good and evil. Could His first real taste of good vs. evil have come from His own creation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? When I was growing up at my old house in the far west end, one of your neighbors had a very broken family. The parents were rude with each other, cursing each other out all the time. The daughter, four years older than me, was diagnosed with chronic lying, and she seemed to reach a state of euphoria telling her elaborate stories that almost seemed true. The son, two years older than me, seemed like a lost soul caught up in a crime, drugs, alcohol, and being mean to people in general. Every word out of his mouth was an obscenity. He poured chemicals on my family's bushes, consequently killing them. I asked my parents why somebody would do that and they said that some people do not value life, care about anything, and just enjoy watching destruction (Now that I think about it, this is similar to Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight). I left the Garden of Eden before I even attended kindergarten. I believe that ounce you lose your innocence and gain the knowledge of good vs. evil, it is impossible to return to the Garden of Eden without the help from Divine Intervention. This belief that Divine Intervention was necessary to get into Heaven/The Garden of Eden is similar to some religions' stances on Heaven. #4 - Why were Abram and Sarai renamed? I think that Abram was renamed by God because of the life-altering event he had. Hagar and Abram bore a son, Ishmael, who is the ancestor of the Arabs. Abram becomes an entirely new person after he walks blamelessly with God and has another son, Isaac, this time under the name Abraham. Isaac and Ishmael are so different because Ishmael's father Abram never "walked with God," because Abram becomes Abraham when he does, and this point is where the life of Isaac's father starts. The name change literally means "exalted ancestor" to "ancestor of a multitude." I believe Sarai's name was changed because of the Divine Intervention by God of making it possible for her to bear Isaac. One thing I find interesting and confusing is that Abram's name was lengthened while only a letter was swapped out with Sarai. Is this true in Hebrew also? Answer according to Google Translate: Sarai to Sarah: one character is changed at the beginning of the name Abram to Abraham: one character is added between the first and second characters #5 - What would have happened if the serpent had told the man to eat the "forbidden fruit," instead of the woman? Arguments can be made from both sides, but the main question being addressed is if this strict religion would win or lose the fight with society's natural roles. In the Bible, I think that if man and woman's roles are switched as early as the Adam and Eve story, then the rest of the roles must be switched to correspond to this. Society's natural roles of men and women put men above women as early as the hunter-gatherers. Another possibility that could accompany this is if the writers changed sections in the Bible in order to assert man's power over women. This is feasible, because almost all of the writers and translators were men, and all if could have taken was one man to miscopy or mistranslate, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a few verses in the Bible, leaving it possibly altered forever. My question is if men's and women's roles had not played out as they had throughout the Bible, and history was written differently, would the roles of men and women today be different, or would we have simply achieved the same ends through different means? #6 - Church Sermon The sermon in Church today was very intellectually stimulating when I thought about how it relates to our ongoing mythology discussions. The pastor's first point dealt with a subtle, but extremely significant difference between two questions we should ask ourselves. Should we ask how the story of the Bible fits into our life? Or should we ask how we fit into the story of the Bible? If one thinks with a religious mind, then one should obviously be asking the latter of the two questions, but if one thinks purely mythologically, is it correct to ask both questions? We often think about how specific stories or motifs relate to our lives in a metaphorical, figurative sense, and then use the second question to connect our lives to the big picture (as in the meaning of our tiny, seemingly insignificant existence in the cosmos). I prefer thinking about both questions, but I probably think about the first question more than the second. Does this make me selfish, self-centered, and uptight? I don't think it makes me extremes of any of those things, but then what does it make me? The subtle distinction between the two questions reminds me of the book of Job, when if that one word in the beginning of the book is changed, the entire figurative and mythological meanings of the book are completely changed. The pastor also talked about culture's impact on religion. He claimed (and I agree) that one's modern religion is a product of that individual's culture and upbringing. We are all brought up being told to believe in what our parents guided us towards, and it is not until we lost our innocence like Adam and Eve did when they left the Garden of Eden that we begin to lead our own lives and make conscious choices in our moral code and religious beliefs. In ancient times with the Israelites, Egyptians, Philistines, and other races, religion was also a product of culture and heritage. Through the Bible, God seems to define His people by His grace (or anger). If it is God's goal to make religion no longer a product of culture, then has He failed (because religion still seems to be a product of culture in modern times)? Or was this even a goal of His in the beginning? This leads me to the question of how God defines or just chooses his people. Does He even choose them? Is it predetermined? I hope not, because I like the concept of free well and would hate thinking that every action I made, even as small as when I blink or twitch a muscle, could be seen, predicted, and in some sense controlled by God. But this makes me think that I would not want my life controlled by God if I reject predetermined fate. Do you want your life controlled by God? After examining Abraham's, Jacob's, Moses's, and Samuel's lives, you would do exactly what Jonah does when God calls to him (run away as soon as he hears God). Some of the pastor's other points included God's grace forming relationships and God's generosity out of hardship. While I don't think I have read enough of the Bible to generalize about the second statement, it seems fairly true, but what the pastor failed to mention is that hardship is also sometimes made by God (Job, the Israelites leaving Egypt). However, I do applaud him for admitting that being Christian does not make our lives easier in any way. He left us with this last question, and I am not exactly sure where to begin answering it: "If Jesus is so important, then why doesn't God make him visible to me?" |
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Hebrew Bible as Literature > Midrash >
Alex Doherty |